VMware spells out limits to the cloud

People and processes are barriers to cloud adoption, not technology and security, according to VMware.

Anh Nguyen
June 16, 2011

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People and processes are barriers to cloud adoption, not technology and security, according to VMware.

“Technologically, the issues [around cloud adoption] aren’t significant. The biggest issues are people and process issues,” said Tod Nielsen, president at VMware, who was in London for VMware Forum 2011.

“People ask about security and privacy. But when you get to the heart of the issue, those issues are about people not trusting each other. People want to control what they own.”

The government initiative, the G-Cloud, is an example of this, Nielsen said: “Some of their barriers are not the vision or technology, but getting each department of the UK to give up control so there can be a pool of cloud resources.”

Nielson believes that while organisations will eventually become 100 percent virtualised, he does not think that they will ever put their entire businesses in a public cloud.

“Today, the average enterprise can envision 30 percent of their workload being in the public cloud, but the majority will be in their private cloud. They will move simple things like SaaS applications and more generic workloads in there, such as development, testing and simple applications, but we don’t see a day where 100 percent of workloads will be in the cloud.

“Every CIO we talk to says their strategy is a hybrid cloud,” he said.

The technology services of the future will also revolve more around the end user, with the iPad being an example of the post-PC era, Nielsen said.